​        In western areas that bordered the South, the other-great-migration process that began during the 1900s continued after 1940, as an intraregional urban movement paralleling the rapid industrial-urban development of South-West cities with defense industries and military bases such as Beaumont, Texas. This city’s Jim Crow past and rapid increase in the Black population that had been sparked by industrial employment opportunities at Pennsylvania Shipyards, Inc., resulted in growing racial tensions. On June 15-16, 1943, the report of an alleged rape of a white woman by a black man exploded into a race riot. 

 

      Whereas in sundown towns, like Killeen, Texas, that became military boomtowns after 1940, the massive federal-economic-military presence of Fort Hood, and the Army’s demand for Black GIs, forced liberal compliance on the region. This made areas like Greater Killeen some of the first to undergo desegregation both under government pressure and as the result of protests by highly mobile democracy activists like members of the 761st “Black Panthers” Tank Battalion which included baseball legend Jackie Robinson. This pattern was replicated in other U.S. cities such as Honolulu, Hawai’i (home of Pearl Harbor), Monterey, California (near Fort Ord), and Spokane, Washington (home of Fort George Wright). 

 

      The most dramatic Black growth occurred in West Coast cities in which 443,000 Blacks were pulled to Washington State, Oregon and California in the 1940s to work in defense industries linked to shipyards, food plants and airplane factories. More than 338,000 of these migrants settled in California, with most Black laborers working in shipbuilding in Los Angeles and in the San Francisco-Bay Area. 

 

      In these places, clustered communities and adjacent-abandoned Japantowns became segregated and overcrowded extensions of “the hood” (or concentrated Black communities) at Fillmore and Western Addition (San Francisco), Logan Heights (San Diego), North Richmond, South-Central Los Angeles, and West Oakland.  Meanwhile, in places like Inner Northeast Portland, Southwest Anaheim, and West Las Vegas, Blacks who represented less than three percent of the general population continued living subtly-structurally peculiar lives that represented both socioeconomic freedom and the constant struggle for freedoms deferred.[2]

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      Segregated housing was the first signal to most African American westerners that structural racism was getting worse, not better, in the aftermath of the Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) U.S. Supreme Court verdict, which made restrictive covenants unenforceable.  The development of the ghetto in which most Black westerners were segregated was brought about through redlining, the antithesis of the development of the promising postwar suburb.

 

      Redlining was the practice of systematically denying home loans to residential areas considered to be high economic risks because they were populated by persons of color, working poor people, and had mixed land uses (i.e., housing near businesses). Central to this suburban policy bias was the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) mortgage program. Their participation in the postwar housing market profoundly restructured race relations in a damaging manner through divesting and restricting people of color to central cities, and investing and allowing whites-only access into newly developed suburbs.  How this translates for the U.S. West was that from 1945 to 1980, suburban societies from Alamo Heights (San Antonio, Texas) to Orange County (California) were enclaves where ethnic Europeans enjoyed being white and privileged and received the full benefits of wealth creation and what it meant to be an American during the Cold War (1947-1991).[3]

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        Following the passage of the 1949 National Housing Act, which renewed the federal government’s commitment to urban divestment through slum clearance, urban renewal, and warehousing Black and poor people in public housing, statewide fair housing campaigns were launched throughout the West. From 1950 to the Fair Housing Act of 1968, this struggle was waged in conjunction with grassroots organizations and local NAACPs that pursued broader freedom rights agendas, such as the Phoenix and Topeka NAACPs—best known for desegregating public education. 

 

      In California, Black assemblymen Gus Hawkins and William Byron Rumford made the postwar struggle for open housing a statewide issue through the extension of California’s FEPC legislation into the postwar period to include fair housing. In 1951, their efforts were supported by a multiracial civil rights coalition called the California Committee for Fair Employment Practices and a new generation of civil rights oriented politicians, led by Governor Edmund G. “Pat” Brown. From 1959 to 1963, this coalition organized the passage of a fair employment practices bill, a fair higher education bill, and three fair housing bills in the Hawkins Act, Unruh Act, and California Fair Housing Act (a.k.a. Rumford Act) which covered public-assisted housing, fair business transactions in housing, and single family housing.  The passage of these bills made California central to the success of the national fair housing, fair education, and civil rights movements. [4]

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        The western color-line also existed in employment. Despite progressive advances in industrial labor during the war, from 1950 to 1970 most African American westerners continued to work as domestics, manual laborers, and in service-related industries. This was a huge blow for Black westerners such as former Kaiser Shipyard worker Margaret Starks, who came from Pine Bluff, Arkansas, to Richmond, California, on the gamble that she and her family would get the opportunity to work in industrial employment, which was a major step in her family’s recovery from the Great Depression and their efforts to defeat racism because they had hoped to participate in compressing the “wage differentials between African American and white workers.” 

 

      This was also the period when the civil rights struggle extended to unfair shop floor practices, which began during the summer of 1943, after the unjust firing of 950-plus African American workers by California and Portland shipbuilders, who protested being segregated into auxiliary unions and being restricted from the full benefits of union membership within International Brotherhood of Boilermakers affiliated unions. One of the fired workers was San Francisco NAACP president Joseph James, who led a collective assault against auxiliary unions in federal hearings and in a class action lawsuit that was heard in California Supreme Court versus the Marinship Corporation in 1944. This effort resulted in the court ordering the Boilermakers to immediately dismantle the auxiliary unions and integrate the fired Black workers within their membership.[5]

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      A year later, World War II ended, and Black workers like James were the first people fired when downsizing and base closures occurred in defense industries, despite the fact that many had acquired high work skills and advanced educations. Most became victims of central city deindustrialization, military base closures, chronic un- and underemployment, and their personal ambitions in a peculiar society that refused to let go of the past. This abrupt turn of events stalled wartime Black middle-class growth that was notable in metropolitan areas from Oahu to Beaumont among prime working-age African Americans in their twenties and thirties.

 

      In metropolitan areas such as Omaha (Nebraska), Albuquerque (New Mexico) and Seattle (Washington), African American economic decline was intricately interwoven into a more subtle, structural and enduring color-line anchored by deunionization, suburbanization, redlining, red-baiting, white flight, and the capital flight and exclusive hiring practices of corporations like Seattle’s aerospace giant Boeing Airplane Company.[6]

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NOTES​

[1] Social Explorer Datasets (SE), Census 1940; Social Explorer Tables (SE), Census 1960 (US, County & State); and Social Explorer Tables/Datasets (SE), Census 1970-2010.​  For more on the FEPC and Great Migration in the West see Broussard, Black San Francisco, 145-146; Dwayne Mack, Black Spokane: The Civil Rights Struggle in the Inland Northwest (Norman, OK: Oklahoma University Press, 2014), 19-31; Herbert G. Ruffin, Uninvited Neighbors: African Americans in the Silicon Valley, 1769-1990 (Norman, OK: Oklahoma University Press, 2014), 82-83; Josh Sides, L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 2003), 36-56; Quintard Taylor, “Urban Black Labor in the West, 1849-1949: Reconceptualizing the Image of a Region” in Joe W. Trotter, Earl Lewis, and Tera W. Hunter, The African American Urban Experience: Perspectives from the Colonial Period to the Present (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), 107-114; and Shirley Ann Wilson Moore, To Place Our Deeds: The African American Community in Richmond, California, 1910-1963 (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 2000), 40-70.​ Moreover, see Jessica B. Harris, High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), 139-166; Cora Faye's Café: Home Cook’n & Soul Food, “About Us” (URL: http://corafayes.com/about-us/); Peter Blecha, “Jones, Quincy (b. 1933)“ in HistoryLink.org, (URL: http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&file_id=10354); Quincy Jones, Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2002); Lulie Haddad and PBS, “Howard Thurman” in This Far By Faith; African American Spiritual Journeys (2003) (URL: http://www.pbs.org/thisfarbyfaith/people/howard_thurman.html); and “Guide My Feet” (Transcript) (URL: http://www-tc.pbs.org/thisfarbyfaith/transcript/episode_3.pdf); Johnetta Richards, “Thurman, Howard (1900-1981)” in Blackpast.org (URL: http://www.blackpast.org/aaw/thurman-howard-1900-1981); Sudarshan Kapur, Raising Up a Prophet: The African American Encounter With Gandhi (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 83-96.

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[2] James S. Olson, “Beaumont Riot of 1943,” in Texas State Historical Association, The Handbook of Texas Online (URL: http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/BB/jcb1.html); and Robert Robertson, “Beaumont Race Riots of 1943” in C-Span (Video) (URL: http://www.c-span.org/video/?304139-1/beaumont-race-riots-1943). ​Also see Killeen City Library Archives, “Killeen Pioneer Interviews” [KPI] (Spring 1977), “Winifred Bell,” 17-18; “Ted Connell,” 4; “John Cough,” 14; “Marion Denton,” 6; “Levy,” 4; “Hellen Little,” 9; Gra’Delle Duncan, Killeen: Tale of Two Cities, 1882-1982 (Killeen, TX: G. Duncan, 1984), 17-32; The Fort Hood Homepage, “History of the Great Place” (http://www.hood.army.mil/history.aspx); and John R.M. Wilson, Jackie Robinson and the American Dilemma (Upper Saddle River, NJ; Pearson, 2009), 25-39; Beth Bailey and David Farber, The First Strange Place: Race and Sex in World War II Hawaii (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1992), 133-166; Carol Lynn McKibben, Racial Beachhead: Diversity and Democracy in a Military Town (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 1-14; Mack, Black Spokane,19-31, 32-148;  Taylor, In Search of a Racial Frontier, 251; and University of Virginia Library, Historical Census Browser: County-Level Results for 1850-1960 (University of Virginia Library: Geospatial and Statistical Data Center, 2005), 1930-1950.​  Demographic data can be found at Bay Area Census, “City of Richmond, 1940-1970” (URL: http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/cities/Richmond.htm); Gibson, “Historical Census Statistics On Population Totals By Race, 1790 to 1990, and By Hispanic Origin, 1970 to 1990, For Large Cities And Other Urban Places In The United States: California - Race and Hispanic Origin for Selected Cities and Other Places: Earliest Census to 1990.” On Blacks westerners with minute populations see Darrell Miller, "Blacks in Oregon” in The Oregon Encyclopedia (URL: http://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/blacks_in_oregon/#.V1NmYof2ajs); De Graaf, “African American Suburbanization in California, 1960 through 1990,” 405-449; Tolbert and De Graaf, “”The Unseen Minority,” 54-61; and Jamie Coughty, “Lubertha Johnson: Civil Rights Efforts in Las Vegas, 1940s-1960s” (Reno: Oral History Program, University of Nevada, 1988), 31-44, 47-54, 59-66.

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[3] Shelley v Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948).​ See Ruffin, Uninvited Neighbors, 160-168; David M.P. Freund, Colored Property: State Policy & White Racial Politics in Suburban America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 99-139; Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 195-230; George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 1-23; and Robert A. Beauregard, When America Became Suburban (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 83; and Carl Abbott, The New Urban America: Growth and Politics in Sunbelt Cities (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 83, 88, 91, 155-156,  232-241, 250; Lawrence De Graaf, “African American Suburbanization in California, 1960 through 1990” in De Graaf (et al.), Seeking El Dorado, 405-449; Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 3-20, 262-274; Emory J. Tolbert, and Lawrence B. de Graaf, “”The Unseen Minority”: Blacks in Orange County” in Journal of Orange County Studies (Fall 1989/Spring 1990), 54-61; and Rodolfo Rosales, The Illusion of Inclusion: The Political Story of San Antonio, Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), 14, 92-95, 100.

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[4] Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, “Provisions of the Housing Act of 1949” in Monthly Labor Review, Vol. 69, No. 2 (August 1949), 155-159; De Graaf, “African American Suburbanization in California, 1960 through 1990,” 415; Cheryl Brown Henderson, “Lucinda Todd and the Invisible Petitioners of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas” in Quintard Taylor and Shirley Ann Wilson Moore (eds.), African American Women Confront the West, 1600-2000 (Norman, OK: Oklahoma University Press, 2003), 312-327; and Matthew C. Whitaker, Race Work: The Rise of Civil Rights in the Urban West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 1-21; and Ruffin, Uninvited Neighbors, 107-115; and Martin Schiesl (ed.), Responsible Liberalism: Edmond G. “Pat” Brown and Reform Government in California, 1958-1967 (Los Angeles: Edmond G. “Pat” Brown Institute of Public Affairs, 2003), 101-124. 

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[5] Quoted from Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo, “Deindustrialization, Urban Poverty, and African American Community Mobilization in Oakland, 1945 through the 1990s,” in De Graaf (et al.), Seeking El Dorado, 347. Also see Moore, To Place Our Deeds, 47.​ Also see Albert S. Broussard, Black San Francisco: The Struggle for Racial Equality in the West, 1900-1954 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1993), 158-165; Delores Nason McBroome, Parallel Communities: African Americans in California's East Bay 1850-1963 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1993), 106-112; and Sides, L.A. City Limits, 66-69.

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[6] Kevin Boyle, The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, 1945-1968 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 61-131; Lemke-Santangelo, “Deindustrialization, Urban Poverty, and African American Community Mobilization in Oakland, 1945 through the 1990s”; and Quintard Taylor, The Forging of a Black Community: Seattle's Central District from 1870 through the Civil Rights Era (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994), 159-184, 192-193. Before the 1960s, the small percentage of Black westerners who worked in trade unions, either worked in all-Black unions like the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids, or in racially egalitarian unions like the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union and Congress of Industrial Organizations affiliated unions like the United Rubber Workers and United Auto Workers. This is further discussed in Broussard, Expectations of Equality, 141-147; Nelson, “The ‘Lords of the Docks’ Reconsidered,” 173-192; Ruffin, Uninvited Neighbors, 119-120; 215; Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier, 289-291; and Whitaker, Race Work, 146-147.

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